Numerous phrases describe the receding yellow text that begins each Star Wars movie: the opening crawl, the roll-up, the scroll. No matter the name, the short paragraphs of expository text instantly place the viewer into the Star Wars universe, briefs him or her as to the status of all things galactic, and kicks off the action.

It's an old-fashioned technique, borrowed from the serials of yesteryear, but given a modern, sci-fi twist. For the prequel trilogy, the opening roll-up has become a personal tradition for Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll, who has executed the crawls for Episodes I, II and now III on his home computer.

"I type the text in Illustrator," describes Knoll. "I then get a layout approval from George [Lucas], regarding where the line breaks are -- he really cares about the typography." At this stage, the text is a rectangular block -- just flat art. Knoll then imports the Illustrator eps file into a program called formˇZ, which turns it into a piece of geometry that can be used in a 3-D program.

"Then I import that into Electric Image and render it. I'm not rendering it with lighting or anything; it's only going through the 3-D program to get the correct perspective."

The title crawl is its own discreet shot that is then edited into the next one -- the first visual effects shot of the film. "Each of the films has a following shot that starts with an empty starfield and then there's a tilt of one kind or another, then the movie begins. I take that very first frame, before the camera move, to use as my background. I just run the whole title crawl over that first frame."

As documented in this article, Knoll researched the original trilogy roll-ups extensively before tackling the opening text for The Phantom Menace. "George was very concerned that we match the one from Episode IV very closely, that the focal length be the same and where the lines converge be the same," he says. Asking sources at Skywalker Ranch for information about the fonts used, he was dismayed to find out accurate records were not kept.

"It turned out that there were all kinds of different versions of the first crawl: the original, the Episode IV release, and all the foreign language versions." Faced with contradictory information, Knoll took a film still of the crawl and reverse-engineered it. He scanned the perspective-titled text into Electric Image, and projected it out as a flattened block of text seen from above. He then took that image to the Art Department, whose typography experts were able to identify the different fonts used within the crawl: news gothic bold for the main body of the crawl and Episode number, and univers light ultra condensed for the title of the film.